NOTE: DEDICATED TO REFERENCING THE PECCADILLOES AS WELL AS THE BENEFITS VIS-A-VIS THE ENTERPRISES OF PEOPLE, INSTITUTIONS, THE MEDIA, RELIGIONISTS, AND GOVERNMENT, RECOGNIZING THAT MY FEET, TOO, ARE MADE OF CLAY AND PREPARED FOR THE ACCUSATION THAT MY HEAD IS FILLED WITH IT, BUT REVELING IN THE FACT THAT IN THE U.S. FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS GUARANTEED EVEN TO THE “LEAST OF THESE,” MEANING ME. Check out new collection: "AVENGED & Other Poems."

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Minister Repents of Racism

This is the first sentence of an op-ed of 23 July in the Lexington Herald-Leader by Presbyterian minister Robert Cunningham: “I’ve spent most of my life ignorant of racism.” He claimed to be 35, also rolled his eyes at the notion of white privilege and that all forms of hatred were “doomed” when he became a Christian, presumably after age 18.

This is the Merriam-Webster definition of racism: “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” There’s no mention of hatred but further definitions of race include mistreatment of others so could involve hatred...or not.

Cunningham wrote that he became convinced of personal racism and is repenting of it but was “slower to admit racial injustice as a social phenomenon.” As an example, he noted that band-aids are the color of whites (not noticeable) but stand-out on blacks, thus causing them to look (feel?) different. Actually, a check with Amazon indicates that band-aids come in “skin-tones” and can accommodate all people of color. Look in pharmacies, as well. What a stretch!

He then juxtaposed Pearl Harbor/9-11 with Jim Crow/slavery, the former solemnized and the latter suppressed and patronized (by whites?) as in “It’s time to move on.” Ask a white kid about Pearl Harbor and get a blank stare. Ask a black kid about slavery and get an earful. Perhaps Cunningham doesn’t realize that the most monumental statue on the Washington Mall is a sculpture three-stories tall of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cunningham, after a homily about Christ, ends with his intention to ask people of color how to help him use his new-found (white?) sense of personal privilege. He's fallen into the Jackson/Sharpton trap for whites that consigns them to self-flagellation for the sins of their fathers, as if one can apologize for something for which he bears no responsibility.

Some religious folks have a self-guilt problem. In the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1995, a resolution asking for forgiveness of and exhibiting repentance for slavery was passed and presented to the three largest black Baptist denominations, whose leaders laughed it to scorn. At least one accused the white Baptists of an attempt to proselytize. Learning nothing from that, the SBC did the same thing last month, well-intentioned but stupid.

In 1960, almost 75% of black families were headed by a father and mother. The bulk of the civil-rights and entitlement legislation was passed in the mid-60s. In the mid-90s, some 75% or so of black babies were born to “single mothers,” and had no documented fathers. This is still the case, and slavery had nothing to do with it. Fornication does.

The Jackson/Sharpton approach is that black children must be indoctrinated asap concerning their victim-hood, not because their fathers have abandoned them but because their ancestors were slaves. The approach does not include the fact that the initial slave traders were blacks in Africa who kidnapped other blacks or physically overcame another tribe and enslaved it or sold its members to the white slave-traders for mere trinkets.

Nor does the J/S doctrine include that slavery was introduced not by Americans but by British colonists in the seventeenth century long before there was a U.S. and that American citizens banished slavery in far less than a hundred years at the cost of 625,000 lives, mostly white American men. Cunningham wrote that before his conversion, apparently, he thought the race-card was overplayed. No! That card was/is overplayed every day in the black community and by white politically correct morons, lest common sense prevail.

My great-grandfather (wounded once and near death by disease once) and two great-uncles volunteered (couldn’t be drafted in Kentucky) and fought in the Union Army. All three were born in England and had no slaves in Pulaski County, Greenwood area. As a Baptist, I take no responsibility for slavery; rather, I’m part of the generation that tried in the 1960s to be of great help to blacks, but that well-intentioned legislation destroyed the black community, now a permanent underclass.

About Me

I'm just an old guy who's been watching the scene for quite a long while, having come along just in time for the Great Depression. Those who are unfamiliar with that term are welcome to look it up. Though not scholarly by nature, I still managed to finish college (though not in four years or even five) and have been fortunate in getting to engage in a diversity of occupations - construction/farm laborer, U.S. Navy, newspaper sportswriter and columnist, radio disk-jockey and sportscaster, schoolteacher, full-time "church worker," railroader - and so I've had the opportunity to see things from both the white- and blue-collar perspectives, as well as those of the sacred and secular. Reading, writing, and music are my passions. The most intensive of my passions, however, is reserved for the writing of hymns.